Given that Facebook is updating it’s T&C, I’m pushing close friends and family to move to Signal. This brings up the obvious question “Why?”. Articulating this helps clarify my own thoughts on the issue too so here we go. Short-answer/TL;DR Signal is more privacy preserving. I’m not comfortable feeding the Facebook data demon more and will do whatever I can to minimise my data footprint. Long answer: Primarily because Signal is way more privacy preserving than Whatsapp. Despite promising otherwise to the European Commission, come February, Facebook is updating its T&C, will integrate Whatsapp with its systems and swallow all metadata available from it . Both apps state that chats are end-to-end encrypted and I trust that.
So the issue comes down to metadata. Prima facie having some metadata extracted so you can be shown mostly benign ads is fine. I am not anti-ad, the business model and the consumer surplus it generates is actually good . However, the setup of selling attention aligns incentives for greater data extraction, increasing ad load and eventually a terrible user experience (see Youtube ad load today vs 5 years ago and what similarly happened with Yahoo)
Metadata is huge factor in privacy - without ever looking at your calls/messages, if I knew the top 10 people you chatted with the most with, I can determine who you are. Facebook and Google are largest data pools in existence and I’m personally not comfortable giving them even more data . Having market players with so much power troubles me because of the degree of centralisation and control, they have. Having such a rich store of information on me that is a complete black box to me is not comforting . Especially when it can be misused. These companies will happily comply with government/law enforcement and as Snowden revealed, governments will find a way even if the company resists . Scary. Seems benign, until one day you’re on the wrong side of the law, which can happen for silly reasons and small violations too.
Funnily, even the companies are acknowledging that they didn’t do their best to preserve user privacy. Snowden revelations triggered everyone to go to https . After seeing the rise of Brave, and moves from Apple in Safari, Google is removing third-party cookies from Chrome. Facebook eventually turned on e2e encryption.
So I find it in my best interest to minimise my data footprint as much as I can, vote with my feet and hopefully force the market towards privacy-preserving products. I do not believe that exercising my choice through the market is the only way to better the situation. We need laws around data-handling, privacy, inter-operability and more . Facebook is not forcing users in the EU to accept their new T&C because Europe has nice laws around this and will happily slap Facebook with multi-billion euro fines . Collective bargaining through the government and regulatory bodies is likely more effective when it occurs. Conscious consumption choices are but one means of raising awareness and moving society towards a better equilibrium.
I think one day we’ll revise our social consensus on social media apps and data ownership the same way we’ve revised our opinions on labour rights, cigarettes and cars without seat-belts.